This May I am planning something of a Busman’s Holiday. Over the course of three weeks I will visit Ontario, British Columbia and California and (hopefully) attend meet-ups, unconferences and conferences as well as checking out the street art and street food.

The twin pillars of the trip are my attendance at both One Team Gov Global in Victoria, BC on the 21st May (which Notbinary are also sponsoring!) and the Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA on the 30th-31st May.

At the moment my agile itinerary looks something like →

12/05/2019 Land in Toronto
13/05/2019 Travel to Ottawa (maybe by train if it is scenic?)
14/05/2019 Try and attend the Ottawa Civic Tech meet up (Sean Boots)
15/05/2019 Be in Ottawa and try and catch-up with some CDS/ex-GDS folk? (Ross Ferguson)
16/05/2019 Either Ottawa or Toronto depending on peoples availability
17/05/2019 Maybe meet-up with people from Ontario Digital Service? (Honey Dacanay)
18/05/2019 Fly to Victoria
19/05/2019 Victoria (maybe see Scott Leslie!)
20/05/2019 Helping the OTGers maybe 🙂
21/05/2019 OneTeamGov Global — Victoria
22/05/2019 Travel to Vancouver (bloody hell Canada is big!)
23/05/2019 Vancouver
24/05/2019 Vancouver
25/05/2019 Fly to San Francisco
26/05/2019 San Francisco
27/05/2019 San Francisco
28/05/2019 Oakland
29/05/2019 Oakland
30/05/2019 Code for America Summit — Oakland
31/05/2019 Code for America Summit — Oakland
01/06/2019 Fly home from SF

I’m up for meet-ups in Vancouver as well but I seem to have a bit of a network blindspot there and I’m hoping there will be plenty of people at the Code for America jamboree to catch up with — assuming Dan Hon doesn’t scare them all away 😉

I’d especially be interested to chatting to anyone who has moved to the ‘dark side’ like me and is working as a consultant for an SME* supplying to Gov. Also I will be trying to interview people about their thoughts on ‘working in the open’ for this bloody book.

There will be stickers. Including some new, limited edition ones.

So if you are going to be at OTG or CfA or anywhere else it looks like I might be do let me know either here or on Twitter. Also if there are any meet-ups or whatever I’m always happy to do a talk — always have a couple of stump speeches ready to roll 😀

*small/medium enterprise